Menu

Category Archives: Internet

Many of my friends have stopped posting on Facebook. Some have uninstalled the app and others even deleted their accounts.

They are not posting on Twitter either, and the more ephemeral Snapchat hasn’t reached critical mass among my closest friends.

Instagram is the only place where I still get a glimpse of the most intimate side of the people I love the most, but I’d say only 20% of my online friends actively use it.

What causes someone to stop sharing on social media? Is it a natural part of being over 30? Or is there an actual problem with the platform? Talking to several of these friends, I learned that there are several groups.

For the last month, I’ve been doing an experiment with my News Feed on Facebook; the goal was to make it a more personal place again, and less of the news-sharing site that it seems to be nowadays.

I’m not saying Facebook is not for sharing news, or interesting websites, or memes… after all, I’ve done that same thing for a long time. The problem is that at some point I got bored of seeing my News Feed filled with these impersonal stories and I ended up visiting Facebook way less than I used to. And when I did, I would incessantly scroll through my News Feed, looking for posts that shared something more personal (an idea, a feeling, a picture), but I found very few of these.

Ideally, Facebook should provide the following option: hide all external content, including content generated by accounts that I’m not following. This wouldn’t necessarily go against the company goal, “to help you connect with the people and things you care about the most“, but admittedly, advertisers and investors wouldn’t be so happy with an option that helps users see less content.

Even though I agree with parts of that statement, I think he failed to mention some important points. Twitter is very interested in its users, in fact it’s dying to find the formula that keeps them engaged. The problem is that the company seems to be focused on making Wall Street happy first.

Much has been written about Bitcoin in the last few days: the demise of Mt.Gox triggered a wave of doubts about the cryptocurrency and the current ways of exchange. However, there are several initiatives trying to improve this situation and today we are interviewing Ximo Guanter, Co-Founder of Coinffeine, a peer-to-peer Bitcoin exchange platform.

It has been a while now that Google announced it would close Google Reader, one of the most popular RSS readers, and since then lots of services and apps have rushed into what looked like a race to be the “best alternative”.

Digg launched its own version, Feedly also started working nonstop on its own independent infrastructure (which successfully launched), and it was rumored that even Facebook was working on some sort of reader.

Now, why did Google finish its Reader? According to Richard Gingras, Senior Director of News & Social Products at Google:

As a culture we have moved into a realm where the consumption of news is a near-constant process. Users with smartphones and tablets are consuming news in bits and bites throughout the course of the day — replacing the old standard behaviors of news consumption over breakfast along with a leisurely read at the end of the day.